joyce wedding

On Thursday Michael Joyce and Kaylee Brink became Mr. and Mrs. Joyce. For your joy and inclusion I decided to post my wedding sermon. The setting was a narrow and tall, steepled church in Port Gamble, Wa. There was no ornamentation in the building except for a single gold cross on the left side of the altar. It was high church, with stained glass and bleak interior, kept that way to ensure that no one worships created things rather than the Creator. The processional started. The music changed from "The More I Seek You" to "So This is Love" to cue the bride. Everyone stands. They do not care about the blank walls and hard pews. Everyone is staring at her. She is staring at Michael. That is what they will remember. My words were true and perhaps someday they will listen to the recording, but that day they listened to each others eyes and returned to earth only to respond in affirmation, "I do!"

What God has joined together, let nothing and nobody separate!

Here is the wedding sermon:

Ephesians 3:14-21 “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family on heaven and earth derives its name, that He would grant you [Michael and Kaylee], according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.”

The reason Paul prays is that you may comprehend love. Right now you both are beginning to feel full (You might be thinking, “Oh, is that what the strange feeling in my stomach is.”). You know what it means to feel full, because you have felt hungry. Right? You both felt it in different way: Michael talking it through with me and other guys in the dish pit at the Coffee Oasis, Kaylee trying to pull further away from Mike only to find that that did not help her stop thinking about him. Hunger is the feeling of Adam in the garden as God brings the animals to him one at a time and he realizes that none of them were remotely attractive. Adam’s hunger was specific—he hungered for Eve. Today is a day of feasting--of not only loving, but being completely loved by the one you love. Love is here, love is happening right now in this room.

Is this what Paul was praying that we would comprehend—this love? The answer is yes, and more. Returning to the story of Adam and Eve will help us understand what Paul refers to as the “riches of Christ.” In Ephesians Paul writes, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior…Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” You see, even at creation God had bigger plans than we immediately see. Adam’s hunger turned to fullness upon meeting Eve. In Ephesians when it says that a marriage is like Christ and the church, it means that from the beginning when we saw marriage—the hunger for satisfaction— we were meant to understand that our greatest hunger can only be satisfied by God. We We were made with hunger so that we could taste of love and be filled. And today we get a taste of God’s love in the marriage of Mike and Kaylee.

Let me share with you, for a moment, what the love of God tastes like. God’s love includes people. People, you and I, were never meant to be separate from God, but made to be joined with him at all times. We see in marriage there is no longer an “I” that does not involve the other person. In joking people will tell you, Mike and Kaylee, that you are losing your freedom—but the love of God that you share is not stifling, it is breathes life into the one loved. Together you are making a covenant which makes one person out of two. Mike, that means there is no such thing as “my night to hang out with the guys” without Kaylee’s agreement. Kaylee, this means being willing to be loved and to let Michael in when gray clouds are hanging over your head? This is the beauty of submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ: you are placing yourself in the care of someone who willingly and daily lays down their life for you. And this, this will make you fall in love with Jesus all the more as you realize through the profound and difficult act of marriage, that God has laid down his very own life to join you inseparably to himself.

Michael and Kaylee, to show the love of God in this way will mean being stretched. We read in Ephesians that the love of God is vast: “How wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.” God’s love being vast and your best love being limited, you will feel like you are asked to do things beyond your ability. Like when Bosley is sick and needs to go to the emergency vet at 2 o’clock in the morning. That is a love opportunity. God is making your love bigger. Oh, but have we not discovered that God is doing something bigger here today

The Apostle Paul tells us that the love of God does thing “far greater than we could ask or imagine.” It would have sounded foolish to ask that two pals in preschool, who walked in and out of each other’s lives, sharing more tough times than easy times, would be married today in a this beautiful old church in the name of Jesus. Do you believe it? For the last several months we’ve had to keep pinching Mike remind him that it is real. He has been known to walk up on unsuspecting people and tell them, “Guess what? I am dating Kaylee Brink.” Guess what? You are nearly married to Kaylee Brink.

Now as part of Michael and Kaylee’s desire to express their absolute indebtedness to Christ and His love expressed to them on the cross enabling them to love one another, they are going to share the Communion together. At His last meal with His followers before He died Jesus said to them, “This bread represents my body which is for you, this cup represents my blood which is poured out for the forgiveness of your sins”. After the lighting of the unity candles, symbolizing the uniting of two lives, Mike and Kaylee will take communion together to remember and hold in their hearts Christ’s love for them.